Back on the lake shore

Winter comes to California too. The sky is grey, we bundle, we spend a bit more time indoors. I'm at Pete's Coffee (and Pumpkin Spice Latte) on Lakeshore Ave, perhaps the most humanly diverse street in Oakland and contender nationwide. The diversity isn't just in the faces, but also the exchanges. No dialog catches me off guard, no matter how disparate the accents. No embrace looks out of place; there are a lot of friends on this street.

Even my nemesis, the traffic, seems harmonious here, though it steals 6 lanes and provides barely a weekday bus.

My thoughts are on Wendell Berry's Human Economy versus the Great Economy. A second read of the chapter is clarifying the concept, though my head still spins to sleep while reading it because it conjures the thickness of thoughts familiar to bedtime.

French is on my mind too, and German, old affections and new ones. I want to live simply in a world where it's easier to be extravagent. I fantasize about a train trip to Yosemite, or Colorado, or winter in Québec City.

Today's a study day. The New Year brings new distractions, so I'd better savor the penultimate day of down time.

The trip home

After three and one half months, and nearly as long without writing here, I am crossing from Nebraska to Wyoming. Never did I stop to think of this state boundary; having never been east of Wyoming, or even much east of Yellowstone on its northwest corner, I never give much thought to the vertical strip from the Dakotas down to Texas. I have been to Texas, so I must partially retract my prior statement. Texas, like the East Coast, is an entity unto itself and shouldn't be confused with eastward migrations across toward the Midwest.


When I began my flight this morning I slept for a spell and then readressed my first Wendell Berry book, Home Economics. Having fallen asleep on several occasions starting this book during the school semester, I was determined to be alert for the first chapter today. Already the book has been a transformative experience. Berry describes a plane trip to Ireland as follows: "For me, air travel always has about it an insistent feeling of unreality. I feel that I am where I do not belong, with a totally arbitrary assemblage of other people who do not belong there either...the insistence in the voices of captain and crew that this experience is perfectly ordinary only intensifies the suggestion of unreality" (Berry, 1987, p22).

I know that I don't belong here, but I can't speak for the rest of the travelers who feel right at home with a touch screen at their reach that gives them TV, movies, games, and even the ability to order food from their seat (I got the coffee.) Few if anyone marvels at the snow-blanketed Rockies. Like me they simply check the flight map for progress, not situation.

Reading Wendell on this ride will likely start a life-long odyssey for me, where I bring together culture and nature in the urban and rural setting. Sightseeing with Ellen two days ago, we spoke with a Romanian woman in the North End of Boston and a homeward Greek professor of entomology taking sabatical from his home institution at my alma mater, UC Davis. We spoke to him over dinner at the oyster bar of the famous oyster house near Quincy Market--where I had my first raw oysters, amazingly. We spoke to the woman on the blustery streets as she led us to Paul Revere's home. These were not iPhone experiences but cultural ones that Ellen brought to being with politeness and curiosity. I learned this same lesson from Ross on my Alps trip, and I must admit that it's hard to remember such a good habit.